How to Feel Safe in Relationships: Why Emotional Safety Starts Inside of You

Alyssa Herzig
Jan 18
10 min read

Updated: Jan 20

By Alyssa Herzig, M.A., PhD

Introduction: Unsafety in Relationships

There are many reasons why we can feel unsafe in a relationship. In this article, I want to focus on one very common — and very important — reason: the fear that having a feeling or a need is unsafe in relationships.

For some of us, this shows up as feeling “too needy.” There is a strong unmet need for affection, connection, reassurance, validation, or love — and the fear that expressing this need will lead to rejection, judgment, loss of connection, or even more pain.

For others, there is a strong unmet need for space, freedom, or autonomy — and the fear that honoring or expressing this need will lead to conflict, guilt, or disconnection.

Many people experience both types of unmet needs at different times.

This experience is often described as relationship anxiety or insecure attachment, but the mechanism runs deeper than labels alone.

Our inner responses often look like this:

We suppress our needs and feelings — yet they haunt us, quietly corroding the relationship from within.
Or we express them — and receive the painful reactions we feared.
Or we feel frozen in fear and analysis, caught between the terror of expressing our needs and the terror of abandoning ourselves by hiding them and consenting to a toxic dynamic.

This is the kind of relational unsafety I’m talking about in this article.

A note on Scope: This article focuses on one core and often overlooked mechanism for relational unsafety. It is not the only reason people feel unsafe in relationships across all situations. Importantly, the processes described here are not meant to apply to situations involving violence, abuse, or immediate danger. If you feel in danger or at risk, please seek support through a crisis helpline or your local resources.

Common Coping Strategies When You Feel Unsafe in Relationships

Many people cope by trying to deny their feelings and needs altogether or hiding them from others. We tell ourselves we are “too sensitive,” “overreacting,” “asking for too much,” or “it's not worth it.” While this can feel protective in the moment, it teaches us that our relationships are only safe when we hide these parts of ourselves. This coping strategy actually reinforces our beliefs that our most vulnerable hidden needs and feelings are unwelcome, unlovable, and threatening to our relational stability.

Many people dismiss or reject their needs for freedom, authenticity, or space. This often results in building resentment and anger, guilt, fears of being trapped and losing themselves, or avoidance of commitment which they anticipate will bring these feelings.

And sometimes we cope by blaming or pushing away others whose feelings and needs trigger our own deep fears, painfully denied feelings and needs, and reactions to our own unmet needs. This knee-jerk blaming and pushing makes it challenging to sustain the closeness we actually want.

Another common coping strategy is focusing only on the external work — trying to screen for a “safe” partner, repeatedly rejecting, leaving, or trying to change or control partners who feel or act in ways that make us feel unsafe. While this is more self-affirming than self-denial and self-abandonment, it often leaves us feeling confused and hypervigilant: “Are they actually bad for me, or am I overreacting?” Instead of feeling relaxed and safe, our nervous systems remain in a scanning, protective state.

When the internal relationship hasn’t changed, familiar dynamics tend to keep showing up — often in new forms. For example, finding someone who finally seems to meet your needs, only to watch them "flip" and start reacting to those same needs once you feel attached.

What’s happening here?

It’s not bad luck — and it’s not a cosmic joke.

It’s a mirror, pointing inward.

Why Repeated Relationship Anxiety Is Not Random

When we repeatedly feel anxious, avoidant or unsafe in relationships — and repeatedly experience others as being triggered by our needs — I will say it boldly: it's not a coincidence.

Very often, what we experience in our relationships with others reflects a relationship that already exists within ourselves. This is not about blame — it is about understanding where real leverage for change actually exists.

This doesn’t mean it’s “all in our head,” or that real rejection, conflict, or misattunement aren’t happening. Rather, when a relational pattern keeps repeating, it becomes essential to look at the relationship within ourselves — between the part of us that has unmet emotional needs and the part of us that reacts to those needs.

The task is to transform that internal relationship.

When we create inner relational safety, something interesting happens: the external world begins to reflect a new image.

Relationships where our needs are dismissed, shamed, or punished simply stop feeling aligned. We don’t feel attracted to them. We don’t feel confused by them. Our minds and bodies remain more at ease — and the filtering process begins to happen naturally.

Where Relational Unsafety and Insecure Attachment Patterns Are Formed

To understand why these patterns feel so automatic and difficult to change, we need to look at where relational unsafety first develops.

Relational unsafety — often experienced as insecure attachment — is generally learned in early relationships, most often with parents or primary caregivers. Although, it can be learned or amplified in later relationships as well.

Healthy children naturally have feelings and emotional needs. When core emotional needs go unmet — for safety, acceptance, attunement, co-regulation, love and affection, connection, authentic expression, space, agency, autonomy — the body produces a feeling. The feeling is not the problem; it is the signal.

Just as hunger signals the need for nourishment, sadness can signal loss. Fear signals a need for safety. Anger can signal violated boundaries.

Feelings exist to help needs get met.

But when a child expresses a feeling or need and is repeatedly shamed, dismissed, ignored, judged, rejected, or attacked, something profound happens. The child doesn’t just experience the original pain of the unmet need — a second, deeper layer of pain is added: the discovery that having a feeling or a need threatens the relationship itself. Feeling, expressing, or acting on these feelings and needs brings conflict or disconnection from the very relationship the child depends on for survival.

Sadness becomes dangerous. Expressing the need for closeness or space becomes risky. Fear becomes conditioned.

The child generally knows that no matter how bad it feels, leaving the relationship with the parent is not an option. So the child stays in these dynamics, adapts to minimize pain and preserve some needs like for physical safety and some connection, and the dynamics become internalized.

How Relational Unsafety and Insecure Attachment Patterns Become Internalized

A relationship is a dynamic between at least two beings, parts, or systems. Over time, children internalize both sides of the relationship.

If a child can anticipate a painful response and shut themselves down first, they may avoid receiving even more painful rejection or punishment from the parent. This is an intelligent adaptation to a painful situation.

Later in life, even after leaving the original environment, this internalized dynamic often persists. A wounded inner child part remains - for example with deep sadness from lack of connection, fear of expressing this need, and memories of profound rejection and pain when these feelings were seen and expressed. The internalized parent becomes another part — trying to protect the self from profound rejection and pain in new relationships by trying to control these dangerous feelings and needs through use of shame, anger, fear, and dismissal.

One part of the self makes another part feel unsafe.

These internal dynamics can evolve and become increasingly complex over time, involving multiple protector and wounded parts that can range from entirely unconscious to partially or fully conscious.

Why Feeling Unsafe in Relationships Keeps Repeating (The Maintenance Model)

In psychology, we distinguish between what caused a problem and what maintains it. Just because a pattern originated in childhood does not mean it has to continue forever.

What keeps relational unsafety going is often the ongoing relationship between our internal parts.

As long as vulnerable feelings and needs are met internally with rejection, shame, criticism, or dismissal, the wounded part of us continues to feel sadness, fear, and unmet — and the unsafety pattern is reinforced.

For example, you might hide your needs and receive approval from a partner, which can feel relieving in the short term. But this often strengthens the belief that you are loved only when the “rejected” parts of you stay hidden. Meanwhile, unmet needs do not disappear. They continue seeking expression or expressing in subconscious ways, recreating dynamics we don't truly want.

Inner Relational Safety: How Internal Safety Transforms Relationships

To feel safe in relationships, we first need to create safety in the relationships within ourselves — between the parts that are wounded and needing, and the parts that respond to those needs. This I call inner relational safety.

This is not about building confidence around the aspects of ourselves that we like. Nor just about telling ourselves that we're good enough. It's about welcoming and meeting the needs of the most vulnerable, terrifying, hated, rejected, and abandoned parts of ourselves, so that we can feel inner peace and safety from the inside out.

That means allowing feelings to arise. Allowing needs to exist. Expressing them fully. Finally embodying, expressing, and welcoming the part that has been screaming in longing, anger, and pain for decades. When needs and feelings have been neglected or punished for decades, there are often very strong emotions underneath — fear, shame, grief, anger, and despair. So we both express and hold space for their fullness, and learn to meet ourselves with deep listening, presence, acceptance, understanding, and care. Creating safety here cannot be abstract or purely cognitive. It requires building trust within yourself and developing the capacity to feel, stay present, express and respond consistently over time. We teach ourselves that there is nothing to fear here. There is no feeling, thought, or need too much for our own presence and unwavering connection.

And when we regularly meet our primary needs, these needs get filled, we feel full, relieved, relaxed, safe, and we can grow.

This is the work. And this is where real change happens.

Why Building Emotional Safety & Trust Takes Time

Like trust in any relationship, inner relational safety develops over time.

Insight can help us understand what’s happening, but safety is built through repeated felt experiences, not logic. The nervous system doesn’t reorganize after a single moment of self-compassion.

Safety becomes embodied when, again and again, we prove to ourselves that our needs and feelings are safe.

Over time, this safe internal relationship becomes the dominant pattern, and safety feels familiar and anticipated when feelings and needs arise. And then when others respond to our feelings and needs with shaming or rejection, we immediately feel and recognize the contrast and do not want it. And we feel clear about this. We no longer feel attracted to that painful dynamic — there is nothing left to learn or resolve there.

Where Our Power to Transform Lies

When we find ourselves repeatedly experiencing challenging relationship patterns with others, it can be very helpful and deeply empowering to look inward — to the relationships between our own inner parts.

Do we have an inner part that is similar to what is triggering us on the outside? What aspects of ourselves do we reject or look down upon? How can we resolve it first internally?

This is a method that creates radical empowerment and real change.

Frequently Asked Questions About Inner Relational Safety and Relationships

Does Inner Relational Safety Replace Relationships or Relying on Others?

No. Developing the capacity to meet your needs internally does not replace mutual care, responsiveness, and collaboration in relationships.

Healthy relationships involve giving and receiving, negotiating needs, and supporting one another. What this work changes is the internal context in which those exchanges happen. When we learn to give to ourselves and truly receive what we give, we move out of scarcity. From that fuller place, we tend to find ourselves in relationships where our needs are met enough, without chronic confusion, self-abandonment, or over-functioning.

Inner relational safety supports healthier relationships — it does not replace them.

How do I know if my partner is actually unsafe, or if this is my internal pattern?

It would not be responsible to answer this definitively without knowing you or your situation. That said, a few orienting questions can be helpful.

If your partner has hurt you physically, sexually, or emotionally, or if you feel afraid of them, it’s important to seek support that prioritizes safety.

If your functioning is declining — in your health, work, parenting, or relationships — as a result of this relationship, that is also a strong signal to reach out for support.

And finally, pay attention to your intuition. If part of you consistently feels diminished, overridden, or unsafe, that matters. This work is not about explaining harm away. It’s about creating enough internal safety to recognize when a relationship is supportive — and when it isn’t.

What does “meeting needs internally” actually look like in practice?

This is a learned capacity that involves developing the ability to stay present with feelings and needs, respond to them with care, and allow them to be felt and received over time.

Because this process is highly individual and embodied, it’s not something that can be fully taught in a few paragraphs. This is the kind of work I guide people through directly, in ways that are specific to their history, patterns, and nervous system.

Can this work if my partner isn’t doing inner work?

Yes. This work does not depend on your partner changing.

When your internal relationship changes, your clarity increases. You tolerate less that feels misaligned, you recognize safety more easily, and you respond differently in moments of vulnerability. Relationships can shift as a result; sometimes it becomes clear that they cannot. Either way, you are no longer negotiating from survival fear or self-abandonment.

If relationships are mirrors, does that mean it’s my fault when someone treats me badly?

Responsibility is not the same as blame. Your body is intelligent, and you did the best you could with what you had at the time. This work is about reclaiming your power — finding new ways to emerge from patterns that once felt binding or impossible to change.

About Alyssa Herzig, MA, PhD

Alyssa Herzig holds a Master’s and PhD in clinical psychology, with training in somatic therapies and body–mind integrative frameworks. Her work focuses on attachment, the development of inner relational safety, and somatic processing and embodiment in the context of both self and relationship.

She offers online one-on-one coaching sessions for adults. You can reach her at

Coaching@drAlyssaHerzig.com or learn more at DrAlyssaHerzig.com/founder

Disclaimer & Legal Disclosure

This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for psychotherapy, diagnosis, or mental health treatment. It does not apply to situations involving violence, abuse, or immediate danger. If you feel in danger or at risk, please seek immediately support through a crisis helpline, emergency services, or your local resources.